The Capacities Between
On responsibility, judgment, and wisdom.
I. The Absence
Particular questions must receive particular answers; and if the series of crises in which we have lived since the beginning of the century can teach us anything at all, it is, I think, the simple fact that there are no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, no general rules under which to subsume the particular cases with any degree of certainty.
Hannah Arendt - Responsibility and Judgment
The crises Arendt (2003) observed in the middle of the last century have multiplied and interwoven, forming what is now called the metacrisis: an entangled field in which ecological disruption, democratic erosion, technological acceleration, geopolitical instability, and psychological exhaustion have ceased to appear as independent challenges and instead constitute a persistent condition. Each intervention, however well-intentioned, fails to bring closure, and often deepens the entanglement it seeks to resolve.
This project has traced this condition to a mismatch between how reality unfolds and how we as moderns have learned to relate to it. The dominant world view assumes what cannot be assumed: that consequences can be calculated, courses corrected, and the relevant considerations specified in advance. From this world view emerge designs that fail to internalize externalities or account for long-term and wide-boundary consequences, and these designs in turn create traps that ensnare individual and collective behavior in self-reinforcing loops. The modern substitution of alignment for judgment, the attempt to make ethics procedural and auditable, conceals rather than eliminates interpretation, creating moral surplus with no corresponding ownership. The acceleration endemic to late modernity reorganizes our relation to the world so that continuous responsiveness replaces the possibility of being genuinely addressed, rendering judgment a form of friction to be designed out. What these analyses share is an apparent absence beneath these structural dynamics.
The metacrisis is not only out there in systems and institutions. It lives in a shared difficulty of accepting that we act within an unfinished world larger than us and our control, one that cannot be mastered without remainder, and that whatever truly matters will matter precisely because it cannot be undone. At the level of what is absent, the metacrisis seems to involve a failure not only of systems but of the human capacities required to inhabit them responsibly, the orientations from which structures and solutions arise in the first place. How a world is taken up, what is noticed and what is ignored, what counts as reasonable, possible, or necessary, precedes and governs what can later be built, implemented, or enforced. The failure, at this deeper level, is an erosion of the ways persons and communities are shaped to see, judge, and act before any particular intervention is even conceivable. The question this essay is framed around is whether we can cultivate the capacities and orientations adequate to this condition, and whether such cultivation can gain traction in a world organized against it. Arendt’s observation, that the series of crises can teach us that there are no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, is not a counsel of despair: it is an invitation to take seriously what we already know but struggle to admit, that the world in which we act is larger than our ability to grasp it.
The capacities in question are not exotic: they traditionally go under names like judgment, responsibility, and wisdom. Throughout this essay, terms such as capacity, virtue, wisdom, phronesis, judgment, and responsibility are used with some fluidity, as they name overlapping ways of pointing toward the same family of human capacities. Their differences matter in other contexts, but for the purposes of this essay, what matters is what they share: these are cultivated over time, exercised in situations, and embodied in persons and communities, under conditions of uncertainty, and in response to particulars that cannot be enumerated in advance. Aristotle (2009) saw the nature of these capacities when he argued that ethical inquiry does not admit of the same precision as mathematics, because its objects are not fixed: “Matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account being of this nature, the account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or precept, but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion.” The good life is not an object that can be derived from first principles and then applied, and practical wisdom, phronesis, is not the application of general laws to specific cases, but the cultivated ability to see what matters here, now, under these conditions, with these stakes. This capacity cannot be externalized without distortion, nor compressed into procedures without loss, because it is inseparable from experience, responsibility, and the acceptance of uncertainty.
Arendt (1958) extends this insight to the domain of collective action: “It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.” Action, unlike fabrication, unfolds among others and produces consequences that escape the agent’s intention: it is irreversible and unpredictable. The contemporary version of the temptation to find a substitute for action is alignment: alignment with targets, standards, models, and risk frameworks whose legitimacy is largely assumed rather than judged. What matters here is to see it as one expression of a broader condition, the systematic erosion of the space in which human beings exercise judgment, transferring ethical weight to systems that cannot bear it. Jonas (1984) saw what this erosion portends: “The gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem. With the latter so superior to the former, recognition of ignorance becomes the obverse of the duty to know and thus part of the ethics that must govern the ever more necessary self-policing of our outsized might.” Power has outrun foresight, and consequences propagate beyond the horizon of calculation, yet responsibility cannot be deferred to systems, models, or procedures without dissolving altogether. Judgment becomes unavoidable where action reaches beyond prediction, and ethics becomes inseparable from the capacity to restrain, interrupt, or refuse.
To see why these capacities are crowded out, and why their cultivation cannot simply be willed into existence, we must see why this isn’t simply a cultural drift or a failure of education, but the predictable outcome of how the modern world has been built. We must understand how orientations acquire durable, world-organizing force, and how the orientations that displaced these capacities became embedded in the structures we inhabit.
II. Materialization
If infrastructure is the scale- and power-amplified way in which world views act in the world, then any attempt to navigate the conditions of the present successfully must reckon with the world views they manifest.
The previous essay traced how world views materialize into infrastructures that constrain subsequent action. The argument is that infrastructures do not just express practical necessities or technical solutions: they crystallize assumptions about what is real, what matters, what can be known, what can be acted upon, and what should be ignored. Materialization names the process by which orientations become embedded in durable systems, procedures, and incentive structures that persist beyond the intentions of any particular actor and that constrain subsequent action as if they were simply given. Infrastructures are, in this sense, maps that have become roads: they are the means by which particular interpretations of reality are stabilized, enforced, and rendered durable across time. Once a world view has been materialized into institutions, procedures, standards, and systems, it no longer needs to be actively believed and maintained in order to operate: it becomes embedded in default assumptions, in what is taken for granted, and in what counts as reasonable, realistic, or inevitable. The world view ceases to function as an orientation and begins to function as an environment, as a background that takes on the guise of plain reality.
The modern world view that has come to dominate global institutions is characterized by the orientation that reality is fundamentally composed of separable units, that knowledge consists in representing and measuring these units accurately, and that control consists in manipulating them efficiently. The operative assumptions are separability, representation, control, totalizability, and reversibility, and these assumptions tend to cluster together under selection because each makes the others easier to operationalize. These assumptions have proven especially compatible with large-scale coordination, prediction, and control, and their comparative advantage lies precisely in cheaper coordination at scale. As such, the modern orientation functions as a coordination technology that survives selection pressures generated by scale, complexity, and institutional inheritance, even when it systematically misrepresents or damages the world it governs.
The capacities we are discussing face active selection against them, more than just neglect: under conditions of large-scale coordination, the modern world view outcompetes orientations that depend on contextual judgment, thick meaning, or local knowledge. Practices that align with the dominant orientation become easier, cheaper, and more legible, while alternatives come to appear inefficient or unrealistic. The capacities adequate to meaningful action are those that resist the forms of standardization, abstraction, and acceleration upon which modern coordination depends.
If world views now operate as environments, then responding to the metacrisis cannot simply mean acting within them more effectively. The turn to solutions, to what can be specified, implemented, and scaled, is itself shaped by the same orientation whose limits have just been traced. Before returning to materialization and asking what might change, it is therefore necessary to examine why response so readily takes this form, and why what is most needed cannot appear as a solution at all.
III. Against Solutions
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle - The Nicomachean Ethics
Naming judgment, responsibility, and wisdom invites the familiar move of designing ‘programs’ for them. The temptation is understandable, but also a trap, and the trap lies in the structure of the response itself: it repeats the logic that displaced these capacities. Solutions are specifiable, implementable, measurable, and optimizable, and the capacities under discussion are not of this kind, as they are ways of inhabiting action rather than simply executing it, and of being in relation to ends, not instruments for achieving ends external to themselves. Wisdom, as has been gestured toward, is cultivated for its own sake, it is a virtue, and its cultivation is inseparable from its exercise. To ask what wisdom is for is already to have missed it. Judgment, responsibility, and other moral virtues share this character, each in its own register. These are not things we acquire and then use, but ways of being that are realized only in their ongoing practice.
The metacrisis demands response, and response seems to require action, and action seems to require solutions. This creates a difficulty: if the capacities we need cannot be solutions, what use are they? The question reveals the grip of the very world view that has brought us here, the assumption that what cannot be instrumentalized cannot matter, that what resists optimization is merely an obstacle, and that the point of identifying what is missing is to fill the gap. Filling a gap is itself a mode of fabrication, of treating the world as material to be shaped according to a design, but these capacities cannot be fabricated, they must be cultivated, and cultivation operates by a different logic. The problem is by no means the presence of solutions or instrumental interventions, but rather the prevalent assumption that what matters must take the form of one.
Vallor (2024) names this difficulty the bootstrapping problem. We need virtue to navigate out of crisis, but the virtues we currently possess may be what led us into it: “When we think about how to meet the challenges facing humanity, we cannot simply beg for more virtue. Pursuing more goodness, guided only by the forms of goodness that we most readily recognize and valorize today, might be like trying to get out of a hole by continuing to dig.” The bootstrapping problem is conceptual as much as practical: we cannot step outside our current moral formation to acquire a better one, because any acquisition will be shaped by the formation we already have. We are always already immersed in a tradition, a practice, a form of life, and our capacity for moral discernment is itself a product of what we are trying to assess. This does not mean that we lack practices within which judgment and practical wisdom could in principle be cultivated, it means rather that the structures by which most contemporary practices operate, e.g. their incentives and criteria of success, are inhospitable for the conditions under which wisdom can take root and mature.
More than us not possessing the “right” virtues, MacIntyre’s (1981) diagnosis shows that the problem is that we no longer possess the contexts within which virtues make sense: “We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have, very largely, if not entirely, lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.” What we have inherited are fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack the contexts from which their significance derived. The language of virtue persists, but severed from the practices and traditions that once gave it content. We speak of responsibility, but responsibility to whom, for what, according to what shared understanding of the good? We invoke judgment, but judgment requires ends worth pursuing, and the question of ends has been displaced by the question of means. The fragmentation is not a surface phenomenon, as it reaches down to the conditions that would make moral discourse coherent. What MacIntyre points toward is the need for construction of a different kind, local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained, as practice and a way of going on. This should not be misread as a nostalgic call to return to some earlier moral order, as the social, technological, and ecological conditions under which earlier forms of virtue were cultivated no longer exist, and whatever cultivation is possible now must take place under radically different conditions.
Wisdom is cultivated in communities, through relationships, over time, and it cannot be mass-produced, judgment is exercised by persons in situations, responsive to particulars that no general account can capture, and it cannot be automated, and responsibility attaches to agents who can be held to account, who can answer for what they have done, and cannot be distributed into systems without dissolving. On the other hand, the challenges we face with the metacrisis are global, systemic, and accelerating, demanding coordination across scales that exceed any community, response times that outpace deliberation, and interventions that no individual can undertake or be responsible for. If the capacities we need resist scaling, there is an obvious mismatch between scale and capacity. The mismatch is structural, as the capacities adequate to meaningful action are exactly those that cannot operate at the scales where action seems most needed.
One response to this paradox is to seek scalable substitutes: alignment in place of judgment, compliance in place of responsibility, optimization in place of wisdom. This is the path already taken, and its consequences lie before our eyes. Another response is to conclude that the situation is hopeless, that the scales have tipped irreversibly, that nothing remains but to witness the unfolding. This may yet prove accurate, but this is not where this essay places its bets. A third possibility is to sit with the paradox rather than resolve it: the capacities that are displaced may nonetheless be necessary, and their necessity does not make them sufficient, but their insufficiency does not make them dispensable. Perhaps the question is less how to scale virtue than how to create and protect spaces where wisdom can be cultivated, how to resist the systematization that would eliminate judgment, and how to become the kind of people, and form the kind of communities, capable of responding to the metacrisis, not to solve it, but without making it worse. If wisdom and virtue ever propagates beyond the contexts in which they are cultivated, this can only occur as a secondary effect of cultivation undertaken for its own sake. The moment propagation and scaling becomes an end in itself, the practice is already hollowed out.
Rosa’s (2019) analysis of resonance shows why this third possibility is necessity more than evasion. Resonance, the capacity to be addressed by the world and to respond in a way that transforms both self and world, cannot be engineered: “Things we can completely control in all four dimensions lose their resonant quality. Resonance thus implies semicontrollability... An attitude aimed at taking hold of a segment of world, mastering it, and making it controllable is incompatible with an orientation toward resonance. Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism.” The same holds for the capacities under discussion, as they are realized only in their exercise, and their exercise requires that they not be treated as instruments. Therefore, the cultivation of these capacities cannot be a program: programs specify outcomes, allocate resources, and measure progress, treating the future as a target to be reached, but the capacities we need are not outcomes. Their cultivation is more like gardening than engineering: a gardener cannot make a plant grow, but can create conditions hospitable to growth, without controlling what grows or when. The difference between engineering and gardening is not that one acts and the other does not, but what they act on, outcomes, or conditions.
Saint-Exupéry’s (1948) famous paraphrased line bears repeating here: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Wisdom cultivation is akin to this yearning, a yearning that can bring with it transformation to our world, but one that cannot be planned out ahead or be reduced to solutions. The change we want to see is not the change we can name: it is the one we forge in the depths of our being. This is a recognition of what kind of thing virtue is, a recognition available to us since at least Aristotle: “It is well said that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.” Virtue is acquired by practice, not theory, and it is not a state to be achieved but a disposition to be cultivated, and the cultivation is never complete. We know, in some sense, what is needed, and we have the diagnosis, perhaps several diagnoses, but what we lack is neither information, knowledge nor solutions. What we lack is the sustained activity of forming and maintaining practices and communities for whom meaningful response is possible. This cannot be prescribed, only undertaken.
IV. Conditions
Resonance requires a world that can be reached, not one that can be limitlessly controlled.
Hartmut Rosa - The Uncontrollability of the World
What can then be said about how these capacities might gain traction? The approach taken here follows the gardener by gesturing toward conditions rather than prescribing outcomes, to ask what kinds of spaces, practices, and forms of life might allow these capacities to take root, without pretending to know in advance what will grow or how.
Wisdom, as Schmachtenberger observes, is about restraint. The metacrisis is in part a crisis of power unbound, of capacities deployed without the corresponding capacity to refrain: the technological civilization that has brought us here is characterized by what it can do, not by what it chooses not to do. The question of limits, of when not to act, has been systematically displaced by the question of optimization, of how to act more effectively. Yet limits are constitutive of institutions and infrastructures, something Rosa’s analysis of resonance also points to: resonance requires what he calls semicontrollability, a world that can be reached but not fully controlled. When everything is available, nothing addresses us. The drive to make the world fully controllable produces alienation, not control, and the implication is that creating conditions for wisdom requires accepting, even embracing, limits to control. This requires subtraction, withdrawal, and the deliberate creation of spaces where the logic of optimization does not run.
MacIntyre’s conclusion that what matters is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained, follows from the recognition that certain goods can only be realized at certain scales. The aspiration to universality, to frameworks that apply everywhere and to everyone, is itself part of the problem, as it abstracts from the particular, and the particular is precisely where judgment, responsibility, and wisdom find their footing. The relationship between scales is ecological: different things happen at different levels, and the health of the whole depends on the integrity of each. Borgmann’s (1984) distinction between focal practices and the device paradigm resonates here: a focal practice is one that engages us fully, that requires skill and attention, that connects us to others and to the material world, and that has its end internal to itself, while the device paradigm separates means from ends, delivering commodities while concealing the machinery that produces them. The cultivation of the capacities we need is inseparable from the cultivation of focal practices, and virtue, as both Aristotle and MacIntyre emphasize, is acquired through doing. It is formed in the repetition and habituation of acts that gradually become dispositions and internal orientation. This cannot happen in the abstract, as it requires concrete practices, situated in communities, sustained over time.
Wisdom, judgment, responsibility, and agency unfold temporally in ways that resist acceleration: habituation takes time, judgment matures through experience, and wisdom accumulates across a life and across generations. The acceleration endemic to late modernity compresses time, demanding responses faster than deliberation can occur, rewarding reaction over reflection, and treating slowness as inefficiency to be eliminated. Rosa’s critique of dynamic stabilization applies directly: a society that can only maintain itself through perpetual acceleration has no space for what requires patience, and the logic of escalation crowds out the logic of cultivation. What takes time appears as a cost rather than a condition, and the result is a systematic selection against the capacities that the situation demands. To create conditions for wisdom requires, among other things, creating conditions for slowness, and this is a recognition that certain processes cannot be hurried without being destroyed. The growth of a tree, the maturation of a person, the development of character: these have their own temporalities, and attempts to accelerate them produce not the same thing faster but something else entirely.
These capacities are fragile, as they can be eroded, displaced, and crowded out, and the spaces in which they might be cultivated are under constant pressure from the logics they resist. Creating conditions for wisdom therefore requires the protection of spaces where different logics can operate. Vallor points toward what might be needed: “We have to strengthen through our institutions and community rituals the moral practice of love and empathy, as an active and joint response to the future’s call of responsibility.” The emphasis on ritual and practice is significant: institutions that cultivate virtue do so not primarily through doctrines or policies but through repeated practices that form participants over time. The discipline of a craft tradition works by immersion and doing, not by instruction and telling. Yet institutions capable of this work are those most threatened by the dominant order: education has been infected by credentialism and economic instrumentality, craft traditions have been displaced by industrial production, and the spaces where cultivation once occurred have been hollowed out, with the practices that sustained them forgotten or trivialized. To create conditions for wisdom therefore requires something like institutional reconstruction, but of a peculiar kind: the patient work of recovering, protecting, and nurturing practices that have not yet been fully extinguished. This work is already happening, in scattered and often invisible ways, and it is not coordinated, nor can it be, since coordination at scale, in the present landscape, would subject it to the very logics it resists.
The aspects of the preceding four paragraphs suggest that the question of how wisdom might gain traction is a question of practice and ways of living more than strategy and solutions. This may seem inadequate to the scope of the challenge as the metacrisis is global, systemic, and accelerating, and what can the local, slow and fragile possibly accomplish against forces of such magnitude? The question assumes that adequacy is measured by extent, that what matters is the size of the intervention relative to the size of the problem, but this assumption is itself part of the world view that has brought us here. There is another way to think about adequacy: an intervention is adequate when it addresses the level at which change is possible, not when it matches the scale of the problem. The metacrisis operates at many levels simultaneously, material, institutional, cultural, psychological, and spiritual, and interventions at one level do not automatically translate to others. The virtues operate at levels that are not directly accessible to large-scale intervention, as they are formed in persons, through practices, within communities. This is both their limitation and their power, respectively, that they cannot be deployed against the metacrisis like weapons against an enemy, and that they operate at the level where human beings actually live, where meaning is made and unmade, and where the world views and orientations that shape everything else are formed.
The same dynamics that enable large-scale coordination, abstraction, and acceleration also render judgment costly, responsibility diffuse, and restraint unintelligible. Wisdom is rare, but also systematically crowded out, the predictable outcome of a world organized around the wrong kinds of success. What follows is an attempt to think about how, under these conditions, space for virtue might nonetheless be protected.
V. The Struggle for Space
Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on earth.
Hans Jonas - The Imperative of Responsibility
The conditions and aspects sketched in the previous section do not establish themselves, they must be created, maintained, and defended against forces that would erode them. This can be recast in terms of phronesis taking up the battle with techne, which is to name a tension that must be inhabited rather than resolved. Techne, in the sense relevant here, is a mode of orientation toward the world, the stance that treats reality as material to be shaped, problems as challenges to be solved, and value as something to be optimized. This orientation is not “wrong” in its proper domains, and the capacity to fabricate and engineer is genuinely human and valuable. However, the difficulty arises when it crowds out other ways of relating to the world, and the analysis of infrastructural materialization makes clear how this crowding out occurs: when world views are materialized as infrastructures, they acquire durability, reach, and causal efficacy, and participation increasingly requires conformity to the dominant orientation. What began as provisional solutions become taken-for-granted necessities, and the conditions that once justified them fade from view.
Phronesis, practical wisdom, names a different orientation, one of discernment, prudent response and judgment, rather than solutionism and optimization, and its exercise does not produce objects but forms persons. Where techne asks how something can be achieved, phronesis asks what, here and now, is worth achieving, and at what cost, drawing on both lived experience and reflective understanding of long-term consequences. The distinction runs deeper than a contrast between two kinds of knowledge. Earlier essays in this project have traced how the ontic transcends or subsumes the epistemic: lived reality precedes and exceeds any articulation of it, and the whole cannot be recovered from representations abstracted from it. The ontic is a receding horizon the epistemic never catches up to. The same structure obtains here: techne operates within the epistemised, on content that has been specified, codified, made transferable, while phronesis operates at the edge where epistemisation meets what has not and cannot be epistemised, the particular situation in its particularity, the that-ness of what presents itself. Phronesis, wisdom, will ever be out of reach, because it is not something we can acquire, but must always work towards. This observation is also articulated from a different direction in McGilchrist (2009, 2021). This structure is why phronesis cannot be reduced to techne, and why the attempt to do so recapitulates one of the structural errors that underlies the metacrisis: specification is epistemisation, and wisdom operates precisely where epistemisation fails to close the situation. No accumulation of rules yields judgment about when rules apply, and no refinement of technique produces the capacity to recognise when technique is inadequate. Phronesis grounds the proper use of techne, yet this grounding is not itself a further technique, it is the lived capacity to answer for what one does in the face of a world that escapes our full understanding.
The struggle between these orientations is not symmetrical. Techne has institutional backing, economic power, and cultural prestige, delivering measurable results and scaling efficiently, while phronesis has none of these advantages, and produces results that are difficult to demonstrate within the logics and infrastructures of techne. In any direct competition, in a landscape built around techne, techne wins, and as such the struggle cannot be direct: the cultivation and protection of spaces must occur where different terms apply. What could institutions look like that served the cultivation of phronesis rather than its displacement? What can be offered is a way of thinking about what they would value, how they would orient themselves, and what qualities one would recognize in them were they to exist. This is description, not prescription: the moment these observations become a checklist to be implemented, they have been converted back into the very logic they resist.
The first quality is stewardship rather than control. An institution oriented toward phronesis would understand itself as a steward: a temporary custodian of something that exceeds its grasp and will outlast its tenure. Stewardship implies care without possession, tending without mastery. The logic of production treats outputs as the measure of success, but stewardship operates like the gardener who creates conditions for growth, and success is measured by the health of the garden across seasons and years, not by throughput. Institutions animated by stewardship would measure themselves by what they enable rather than what they deliver, by the persons and practices they form rather than by their products. This orientation stands against the managerial mindset that treats institutions as instruments for achieving specified objectives: a steward tends, preserves, and passes on.
The second quality is humility before the whole. The holistic view developed across earlier essays holds that reality cannot be totalized, that any representation leaves a remainder, and that the whole is prior to the parts we abstract from it. Institutions that took this seriously would build in an acknowledgment of their own incompleteness, resisting the temptation to specify exhaustively, to proceduralize fully, and to close the space of judgment. Institutions that assume their own completeness calcify, becoming unable to respond to what they did not anticipate and unable to learn from what exceeds their categories, while institutions that build in incompleteness remain permeable, capable of being addressed by what lies beyond their current understanding. Within this also lies a commitment to long-term, wide-boundary consideration of action, and the capacity to refrain when the uncertainty and effects of such action are open to unacceptable damage.
The third quality is situatedness over abstraction. Holism implies that context is constitutive: what something is cannot be separated from where it is, when it is, and in relation to what. Institutions that honored this would resist the pull toward abstraction that characterizes modern organization, attending to particulars, to local conditions, and to the specificities that general frameworks necessarily obscure. This does not mean that nothing general can be said or done, but it means that the general must always be returned to the particular, that principles must be interpreted in situations, and that rules must be applied with judgment. An institution oriented toward phronesis would seek to cultivate such interpretive work, training its members discernment and judgment, rather than procedures and compliance.
The fourth quality is the priority of internal goods over external goods. External goods, such as money, status, and power, are the rewards that come from successful participation in an activity but are not intrinsic to it, while internal goods are those that can only be realized through participation in the activity itself, and whose realization enriches the entire community engaged in the practice. Institutions dominated by external goods tend to corrupt the practices they house: when universities are organized around rankings and research funding, scholarship suffers, and when hospitals are organized around throughput and revenue, care suffers. In each case, the external goods are not bad in themselves, but their dominance distorts the practice, subordinating its internal logic to imperatives foreign to it. Institutions oriented toward phronesis would organize themselves around internal goods, refusing to let external goods define the institution’s purpose, requiring recognizing and valuing what cannot be quantified.
The fifth quality is the traceability of responsibility. One consequence of the displacement of judgment by alignment is the dissolution of responsibility into systems: when decisions are made by procedures or algorithms, no one is responsible in the full sense, everyone is compliant, and no one is accountable. Institutions oriented toward phronesis would resist this dissolution, structuring themselves so that responsibility remains traceable to persons, answerable in terms that go beyond following the rules. This requires limiting the scale and complexity of institutional processes, maintaining the human scale at which accountability is meaningful, and it also requires a culture in which taking responsibility is honored rather than punished, where admitting error is a sign of integrity rather than weakness.
The sixth quality is the recognition that limits are constitutive. An institution that attempts to do everything does nothing well, and an institution without boundaries cannot maintain the coherence necessary for cultivation: the clarity about what an institution is not for is as important as clarity about what it is for. This extends to time. Institutions oriented toward these capacities would operate on timescales appropriate to cultivation, resisting the pressure toward continuous acceleration, understanding that some goods take generations to realize. Such institutions would be willing to say no, to refrain, to leave undone what others might do, holding present and future in tension rather than sacrificing long-term cultivation for short-term metrics, building institutions capable of thinking in decades and centuries rather than quarters and election cycles.
These qualities are ways of thinking about institutional design that follow from engagement with what virtue really means, and they offer descriptions of what institutions animated by phronesis would value and embody, rather than specify what any particular institution should do. They also describe almost no existing institution, and this is not surprising, as the dominant order selects against institutions organized along these lines, since they are inefficient by the prevailing metrics and do not compete well for resources, attention, or prestige. From the perspective of techne they likely appear as relics, yet they exist and persist, often in forms that do not announce themselves: craft traditions that have transmitted skills across generations, indigenous communities that have preserved ways of knowing that modernity dismissed, small schools that have resisted the pressure toward standardization, and as countless other forms that escape the notice of our attention. These are instances to learn from, not to replicate, evidence that alternatives are possible even when they are not dominant. The struggle for cultural space is the struggle to create, maintain, and protect such instances, manifesting in the ongoing work of those who find themselves called to a different way of organizing life, and who are willing to bear the costs of that refusal.
Communities and institutions that begin with genuine orientation toward cultivation can be seized and corrupted by the logics they resist. Any institution capable of forming persons and cultivating virtue is also capable of deforming them and cultivating vice. For this reason, the question is never whether judgment is exercised, but under what conditions it remains corrigible. This points towards a need for vigilance, for building in mechanisms of accountability and self-correction, and for maintaining the capacity for internal critique. One recognition that may offer some protection is the refusal of monopoly: an institution that claims exclusive access to truth, to formation, or to legitimacy is more susceptible to capture than one that acknowledges alternatives. Pluralism at the level of institutions provides a check that no single institution can provide for itself: if one community is captured, others remain, and if one tradition calcifies, others continue to grow. The struggle for cultural space is the maintenance of many alternative orders, rather than the establishment of a single one. Another protection lies in the relationship between institution and practice. MacIntyre distinguishes between practices, which are the activities through which goods are realized, and institutions, which are the social structures that house and support practices. A practice is undertaken by individuals but constituted by communities: one person cannot sustain a practice alone, yet a practice exists only in the activity of those who engage in it. The threat is always present for institutions to subordinate practices to their own imperatives, and the health of a practice depends on maintaining its relative independence from the institution that houses it, so that the institution serves the practice rather than the reverse. This requires practitioners and leadership who are loyal to the practice first and to the institution second, who are capable of criticizing the institution in the name of the practice it is meant to serve. This capacity is itself a form of phronesis, a judgment about when loyalty requires criticism and when criticism serves loyalty.
Jonas wrote that the new ethics required by technological civilization would be an ethics of responsibility oriented toward the future. The institutions we need are those capable of bearing this responsibility by holding themselves accountable to a future they will not see. This is stewardship extended across time on behalf of those who are not yet here to speak for themselves. As the proverb goes: “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Such responsibility cannot be encoded in rules, as it requires judgment about what the future will need, and such judgment is necessarily uncertain. It requires the humility to act without knowing whether one’s actions will prove wise, and the courage to act nonetheless. It requires, in short, the capacities this essay has been circling: agency, judgment, responsibility, and wisdom. The institutions that might cultivate these capacities must themselves be animated by them, there is no escaping the circularity. We must become what we are trying to create the conditions for, and in becoming it, we create those conditions. The balancing out of techne is achieved through the daily decisions about what kind of institutions we build, what kind of communities we form, and what kind of persons we become.
The protection of spaces where different logics operate is also a political struggle, involving questions of power, property, and collective action. This essay operates at the level of orientation and recognition, not political strategy, and it assumes that cultural and political struggles proceed simultaneously rather than sequentially. The political question, what arrangements of power would allow these spaces to exist and persist and to what extent any of this would be possible in a fragile and aggressive geopolitical landscape, remains open.
VI. Living the Question
The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him…
Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
Arendt’s observation at the start, that the series of crises can teach us the simple fact that there are no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, is a permanent condition to be inhabited. The absence of general standards is not a problem to be solved but the space in which judgment becomes necessary and possible. This space is uncomfortable, as it offers no firm ground, asking that we act without certainty, decide without complete information, and bear responsibility for outcomes we cannot anticipate. The temptation to escape this space is perennial, and every system of rules or procedure is, in part, an attempt to close what must remain open. The appeal of such closures is real, as they promise relief from the burden of judgment, security against the risks of error, and efficiency in the face of complexity. What they deliver is the gradual atrophy of the very capacities that would allow us to respond to what rules cannot anticipate.
The metacrisis is, among other things, the cumulative consequence of this atrophy. Our systems, procedures and measurements have become more refined, yet we find ourselves less capable of responding to what we face. The sophistication is part of the problem, as it has absorbed the energy and attention that might have gone into cultivation, substituting technical improvement for moral development. We have become expert at optimization and impoverished in wisdom, but rather than abandon techne we should recognize what it cannot do: judgment, wisdom and responsibility will ever remain irreducibly human tasks.
The holistic understanding developed across this project points toward why this must be so. Reality is not exhaustively representable, and the whole precedes and exceeds the parts we abstract from it: every model leaves a remainder, and every framework has an outside. Wisdom, as we have seen, is a disposition to be cultivated, a way of being oriented toward the good that includes knowing when not to act, when to refrain, and when to accept limits. As such, it cannot be encoded. This does not mean that virtue operates without knowledge, nor that theoretical understanding is dispensable. On the contrary, virtuous action often depends on abstract, long-term, and counterfactual understanding (e.g. of ecological thresholds, systemic risk, historical trajectories, future vulnerability), but such understanding can inform virtue only when it remains answerable to concrete situations and human responsibility rather than replacing them.
As such, wisdom is not the possession of more rules or better rules, but rather the attunement to the situation as it actually presents itself, a responsiveness to what exceeds any specification. Gadamer (2004) saw that phronesis is hermeneutical: understanding moves through the whole and the particular together, and application is woven into understanding rather than appended to it. There is no moment of pure comprehension followed by a separate act of use, the situation is understood only insofar as it is already being answered. This means there is no outside to phronesis, no external standpoint from which to evaluate whether one’s judgment is correct before one judges: one is always already within practical engagement, always already interpreting, always already responding. The demand for a rule that tells you when to follow rules, or a method that guarantees wise application of method, is a demand for an exit that does not exist. Phronesis can only be cultivated from within, through the sustained practice of judging and acting and bearing the consequences, gradually forming the dispositions that allow one to respond to situations whose demands cannot be known in advance.
Cultivation of wisdom is necessarily incompletable, the ongoing work of becoming human under conditions that make such becoming difficult. It has always been difficult, and the conditions change, but the difficulty persists. What is distinctive about the present moment is the scale and intensity of the forces arrayed against this work, and the corresponding urgency of taking it up. Just as the metacrisis names that which is within and between the many crises we face, wisdom and virtue are that which is within and between any and all serious approach to the metacrisis. By this is meant that it is central to our response to it, a condition of meaningful structural change, because cultivating virtues changes our orientation, and our orientations shape our institutions. Without the cultivation of these capacities, structural interventions will reproduce the logics they aim to transform, while with such cultivation, structural interventions become possible that are not currently imaginable, because what is imaginable depends on who is doing the imagining. Furthermore, with such cultivation, forms of coordination may emerge that no one set out to design or scale. Vallor's bootstrapping problem does not dissolve but is inhabited: we begin from where we are, with the virtues we have, and the work of cultivation is itself transformative of those who undertake it. MacIntyre's lost contexts are not recovered but rebuilt, partially and locally, in communities that sustain practices over time. There is no clean entry point, only imperfect beginnings, and no guarantee that what emerges will prove adequate. This seeming circularity is the shape of any living tradition, which always forms its members through participation in what those members are simultaneously sustaining and transforming.
No solutions have been offered here, instead what has been articulated is why solutions of the familiar kind cannot address what we face, and to gesture toward what might. The gesture is necessarily incomplete, pointing toward something that cannot be fully said, that can only be undertaken. This is a consequence of its subject matter, as wisdom cannot be transmitted in propositions, and it can only be cultivated in practice, in community, over time. There is an obvious tension here it is hard to escape: this essay argues that wisdom cannot be transmitted in propositions, yet its very topic is wisdom. This is the limitation theory faces, but as the Zen saying goes: the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, but without fingers pointing, many would never look up.
Let us look at the question we opened with, whether we can cultivate the capacities and orientations adequate to our condition, and whether such cultivation can gain traction in a world organized against it. As we have now seen, the conditions are not favorable, scale, incentives and infrastructures select against just what is needed, and the forces of acceleration and optimization are powerful and not standing still. Every year, the space for alternatives contracts further, and every year, the pressure toward alignment with the dominant order intensifies. On the other hand, the capacities that are lacking have not disappeared: they persist, in persons and communities, often invisible to the metrics that count what counts. Whether we can cultivate the capacities and orientations adequate to our condition admits only of a response, the ongoing activity of those who take up the work, who refuse to accept that our present society is the only possible society, and who commit themselves to the struggle for space where different ways of being remain possible. This is what it means to live the question, not to answer or resolve it, but to inhabit it, and to let it shape how we see, how we act, and how we become. To live the question well is already to have begun the work that no conclusion can complete.
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet
References
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Aristotle (2009). Nicomachean Ethics (Trans. Ross, W. D., Rev. Brown, L.). Oxford University Press. [c. 350 BCE]
Borgmann, A. (1984). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. University of Chicago Press.
Gadamer, H-G. (2004). Truth and Method. Continuum. [1960]
Jonas, H. (1984). The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. University of Chicago Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and his Emissary. Yale University Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. Perspectiva Press.
Rilke, R. M. (2023). Letters to a Young Poet. Penguin Classics. [1929]
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Saint-Exupéry, A. de (1948). Citadelle. Gallimard.
Vallor, S. (2024). The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. Oxford University Press.